Disclaimer - This is a re-post of an article I created for the VMware Cloud Management blog site (blogs.vmware.com/management). Overview In this blog post I’m going to show how you can use vRealize Automation and vRealize SaltStack Config together to deliver automated application deployment. Both of these products are individually powerful but when you combine … Continue reading SaltStack Config – Deploying Apps with vRealize Automation
vRA8
SaltStack Config – Reactors (Not Nuclear Ones!)
Overview In the last article I talked about how we can deploy a configuration onto a Salt Target that allows the Target to send events onto the event bus when defined criteria are met. This type of configuration is known as a Beacon and might be defined for a config deviation, a service crash, package … Continue reading SaltStack Config – Reactors (Not Nuclear Ones!)
SaltStack Config – Creating Beacons
Overview In the last article I covered some of the options available to build configuration maps for different types of servers. This allows a new Minion to be effectively assigned a role and then receive the States that are matched to that role from the execution of a Highstate. But how do you persist some … Continue reading SaltStack Config – Creating Beacons
SaltStack Config – States and State Files
Overview In this article I'm going to start delving into Salt states so you can start to see how SaltStack Config goes about applying configurations to workloads (i.e. Minions). I'm just going to be looking at some of the basics here so we'll save things like requisite states, template filtering etc for a future article. … Continue reading SaltStack Config – States and State Files
SaltStack Config – Starting At The Beginning
Overview I could quite easily just go straight into some SaltStack examples and configurations, completely bypassing what it is, where it came from and how we plan on using it in the future but that would be no fun. So in this article I'm going to cover some of the fundamentals surrounding SaltStack and SaltStack … Continue reading SaltStack Config – Starting At The Beginning
vRealize Orchestrator – Let’s Talk Polyglot
Overview For many years the VMware Orchestration platform (i.e. vRealize Orchestrator or vRO) has been leveraging JavaScript as its scripting language of choice. Any out of the box content and customer provided custom content has been created in JavaScript leveraging plugins to expose external product capabilities that can be leveraged via JavaScript objects, properties and … Continue reading vRealize Orchestrator – Let’s Talk Polyglot
Workspace One Access – Reverting Access Policy Changes When You Are Locked Out
Overview This is a very quick how-to with regards to re-gaining access to Workspace One Access following a miss-configuration of the default access policy. This is much more common than you would think! It's Easy When You Know How In older versions of vRA (7.x) it was quite common to make an access policy change … Continue reading Workspace One Access – Reverting Access Policy Changes When You Are Locked Out
vRA with Terraform
Overview Using vRealize Automation 8 (either SaaS or On-Prem) directly via the GUI or even the REST API is all well and good but what about if you have slightly different requirement such as creating and consuming constructs and content as code. One of the major selling points of vRA is the IaC use case … Continue reading vRA with Terraform
vRA with Cloud-init and Static Networking
Overview This article is all about leveraging the static network assignment construct in vRA Cloud/8 Cloud Assembly blueprints and the impact this has (currently) on provisioning vSphere VMs. This topic seems to cause lots of head scratching and issues, really because currently if you try and leverage static address assignments (i.e. asking vRA to assign … Continue reading vRA with Cloud-init and Static Networking
Identity Management – Scale Out via vRSLCM
Overview VMware Identity Manager aka vIDM (soon to be known as Workspace One Access) is a key piece of the vRealize Automation stack. Previous versions of vRA used an embedded build of vIDM within the vRA appliance and allowed the identity management capabilities to scale out as vRA itself scaled. With vRA 8 this is … Continue reading Identity Management – Scale Out via vRSLCM